[GRASS-user] Re: [GRASS-dev] GRASS OSGEO Steering Committee

[Markus Neteler]

Thanks, Dave, for putting energy into the GRASS PSC discussions.
I accept the nomination for the PSC.

A few remarks:
I think of OSGeo as an "umbrella" foundation [1]; it would be "funny"
if GRASS didn't make part of it. What's such a foundation without
a "pure" GIS project? And, since the GRASS project itself makes use
of some proposed member projects, we can just gain from joined
efforts.
If you make part of something you can much easier control it.
Staying outside will just keep us in the niche.

However, I strongly agree with Helena (earlier postings from her)
to work against unnecessary bureaucracy. We should keep the our
decision process as free as possible since this worked for us pretty
well. The PSC should take care of formal things as much as needed
but GRASS should certainly remain community driven.
Helena has quite some experience due to her participation in
the Open GRASS Foundation efforts in the early 90's (not sure if she
was actually a member of it) which became pretty complicated in
the end. We don't want to repeat that, I think. But OSGeo.org is
much more community driven and I am sure that it will stay like
that (just see who is active there!).

For the skeptical people: due to the GRASS discussions, OSGeo
already changed the original proposal of a "contributor agreement".
This indicates that things are not set in stone and that we - as
GRASS people - do have influence, even on the procedures.

I would accept that GRASS contributors sign some document to ensure
that they know what they do: contributing to a GPL'ed project and
no knowingly having copyright infringments in their submissions.
This (low) level of legal control we should follow. In fact, we would
just continue to follow it because in 1999 we did a rigorous source
code verification and removed quite a bit from the repository which
wasn't GPL compliant. Since we already do so, we can also ask
contributors to send a GPG signed message stating this (or Fax or
whatever is appropriate).

Finally: I would appreciate if some people who already declined
to make part of the proposed PSC would think again about it. We
need accepted and well known people in the PSC to make it a reliable
group which is well embedded in the GRASS community. Let's make the
GRASS PSC special with the needed conformity for OSGeo.

cheers
Markus
 
[1] http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/Potential_tasks_and_responsibilities

-- 
Markus Neteler  <neteler itc it>  http://mpa.itc.it/markus/
ITC-irst -  Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica
MPBA - Predictive Models for Biol. & Environ. Data Analysis
Via Sommarive, 18        -       38050 Povo (Trento), Italy